Material Exercises

Author: Blanca Varela

Publisher: Black Sun Lit (2023)

Flesh wounds, flies, flowers, and freedom. Blanca Varela’s Material Exercises is a declaration of divine oblivion vis-à-vis a violent mysticism. Here, no soul ascends to commune with a vengeful deity: salvation is not achieved from bodily punishment but found in the poetic possibility that emerges from the corporeal tension between tactility and spirituality, night and day, the cogito and the empirical, where language is both god’s first gift to humankind and the cadaver in which the sacred father decays with his mortal creation. Translated by Carlos Lara, Material Exercises is a display of the vatic exorcism of the unconscious and a phenomenological investigation of space and intersubjective incarnation.